December studio update and Pint progress report

Hello Giants,

Welcome to the last Bearded Giant Games studio report for 2018! The store has been live for a while now and sales have been steady. I’m happy with how well it performed ahead of my initial launch estimate. Starting with January 2019 I’ll open up a new blog category titled Sales and Transparency report where I’ll go into details on how the studio is performing. Hopefully people will be able to learn from my experience and I can grow both as a business and as a developer.

For the past few days I’ve been bedridden, struck by the flu so I had enough time to work on Pint, my new internal game engine. It’s pretty stable and nice so far and I cannot wait to push it out into full production use soon. In the video bellow I’m rendering ~1400 sprites for both backgrounds + the enemies on screen. All scaled, transformed and translated and the FPS is over 100 even on my little Chromebook 14. The memory footprint itself is also extremely small with the game eating less than 48 mb of ram.

Graphics are all placeholders from google images/oga for testing purposes. I’m using a neat little rendering technique inspired by how the scene/roads are rendered in a game like Outrun and it seems pretty fun. Once I add support for animation frames in Pint I think I’ll have a pretty nice demo to release alongside the engine. It just needs some explosions, some screen shakes and proper animations.

On the game development side I have no new game in progress right now however I am toying with a few ideas. I like the faux 3D and fake perspective usage in other games and I’ll probably play with that for my next title. The goal is to have a working game prototype by the end of January so I can focus on developing that in the upcoming months. I’ve already been throwing out some ideas and started a few debates on this subject with people from our Discord server (you are free to join the server and tag along in the conversations as they happen) so I guess I’m narrowing down the list of possible game candidates from a handful to 3-4 projects. Only one will survive in the end!

That’s all for this Studio Update. Pint development is going great, evolving slowly but steady into a framework I can use and abuse in the future. The discord community has been growing nicely in the past few weeks and more and more people are learning about the Linux 1st Initiative (a huge thank you to GamingOnLinux for their shoutout and the discussion it started on their article).